Another Call Home
by FlickingCandle
Summary: They're coping, all in different ways, and sometimes, that's a bad thing. (Post-Season 3)
1. Chapter 1

**A/N:** It's my birthday tomorrow, so I whipped up this self-indulgent angst fic! Sorry~

Each ninja's POV is in chronological order, starting from a little bit before S3, and goes until about 7 months after the season finale.

Another Call Home

 _Description: Ashes, ashes, everything falls around,_

 _ashes, ashes, the home goes down._

* * *

Kai didn't start with a home. So he kept his family, he found a home, he made one. He kept close to Nya, he built alongside her, and did everything with a fiery passion.

Then other people blasted their way into his heart.

Four other ninja, of green, blue, black, and white, slammed their feet on the gas and catapulted themselves right into it. Maybe each one didn't have that exact way of doing it, but a unique one, each original for them. Kai learns that each of them are so wonderfully unique and special, and it's those little things that he learns that make him so sure.

Cole waits until the very last second before they're going off to a fight to brush his teeth. Jay combs his hair rapidly, faster than what would be normal. Lloyd rocks back and forward on his feet when he's nervously talking. Zane can dance tap like a master.

It's not even the big things, like how Zane is somehow about to speak around 11 languages fluently for no reason, or how Jay is a master engineer. Not the giant, life changing things about his team. Just the small tidbits he runs into during their everyday life.

Every single thing makes Kai more sure that his family won't break apart.

At least, before the blackout.

* * *

After every single thing, after every single stupid battle they'd jumped into without a second thought, this is the one that they lose someone in. A horrible, quick fight that barely lasted minutes but seemed like hours while they watched, helpless and grounded, while their friend did so much in the air.

Cole had been the one to find it, even though his vision started blurring with spots and tears that seemed to make everything seem like a hazy nightmare, he had spotted the face in the snow. Looking so mechanical at the time, more unreal than it had ever been while on Zane.

It was just half. After the shock had worn off, they'd started to scream, looking through the city, looking for the rest of Zane. But no- all they'd found was the corpse of the Overlord, frozen in one of the giant blocks of ice.

'He can wait,' Cole remembered Lloyd saying, voice choked as he stared at the creature. 'we need to find… we need to find Zane.'

They had. Little bits and pieces- burnt wires, an arm barely clinging together with only the melted metal, a scorched hand with fingers all bent out of place. Every small, miniscule reminder they had of Zane was horrifically disfigured. The thing they reminded them of, each time they dug one out of the ice, wasn't Zane- their kind, smiling Zane, who fought with them, who was graceful and unique- it was the sacrifice. The moment when Zane floated high about them, body surrounded with a blizzard that was all his own but not.

Cole remembered collapsing on the ground when he had seen a fragment of a smile, far below the ice.

* * *

Jay had no clue why he was staring, empty-eyed, at his toolbox. It had been a few weeks after Zane had made his stupid, heroic sacrifice, and it had seemed as though every person in Ninjago was trying to swarm the ninja, trying to take away their right to grieve.

But they couldn't. Interviews were pushed away, run from, reporters were knocked aside violently with small, barely-controlled earthquakes, cameras were melted and short-circuited. The Destiny's Bounty took flight into the sky again, barely fixed by the two mechanics who had tears streaming down their faces. The TV, after running it's first segment on Zane, had been kicked by himself until the screen shattered.

Elemental powers ran rampant across the decks and rooms of the ship. Crackles of electricity flew across the scratched wood. The earth shook beneath them, even as the Bounty flew high above. More often than not, the smell of smoke trailed after Kai. There was no ice.

Jay kept looking at his toolbox.

He wanted to do something, but he couldn't figure out what.

* * *

Everything was hazy in the months following Zane's death. Jay was locked up in his workshop, working on a project while he was trying to cope. To the others, it seemed like he was trying to drown himself in his work, but they didn't know for certain.

On the other hand, Cole's way of grieving was subtle, but obvious. He would stop at things that reminded him of who they had lost, even small things. In the first few weeks that they had returned to the Bounty, he couldn't even go near the kitchen or in their shared bedroom. He had avoided sleep for a long time before finally passing out on the deck of the Bounty, right in the middle of the cold floorboards.

But this seemed to be the opposite of Kai's mourning. Who had been doing absolutely everything to remind himself of Zane, and what he did. He stayed up, watching the dawn break, alone, just like the Ice Ninja often did. Tried to pick up cooking, cleaning, and quiet reading at night. Yet nothing seemed right. The others would watch Kai speed around the ship, something that might've broken the desolate air a long time ago but now just seemed to add to it, as he panicked over misplacing his wallet, which held a picture of them all smiling. Kai, at almost every turn, tried to remind himself that there was still family, there was still Zane, even though he was gone.

Lloyd, he didn't know what to do at all. Zane was gone. Nothing could bring him back. Lloyd knew it, but all of the mourning and coping, just passed right by him. Everything inside of him told him to mourn, though. He wanted to feel the urge to cry, but couldn't muster up the tears or the sorrow. Even a feeling he had to repress, even violent anger he kept in clenched fists at his side, he wanted to have. But there was absolutely nothing. Not even numbness. He wanted to feel, he wanted it so badly, he even though he wouldn't have expressed it anyway. Because it just felt so wrong, to feel like nothing had happened.

And it wasn't as though he denied it had. The blackout had happened, and the lights in Ninjago had all gone out, Zane among them. There was no point in refusing it.

...and yet, it felt like nothing to Lloyd.

* * *

Nya waited, day after day, month after month, for it to be a dream. A horrific nightmare, because families don't break apart like that twice, right? It was a terrible dream, something she would wake up from and sob and scream in her bed, waiting for her brother to come and hear her and comfort her. They'd stay up all night for no reason than they could, and only get out of bed when the dawn came and Zane's footsteps began to move quietly across the floorboards, then Kai would spin into his clothes and Nya would shove Kai out so she could change, and because he had made a giant mess on the floor with his tornado.

That's what would happen. Exactly. She's wake up, and she might have some emotional pain from the dream, but everything would go away.

Nya checked clocks, waiting for the time to change, in seconds, from 3:34 to 7:28. Dreams did that, she remembered, but had that information been fabricated inside her nightmare? It was probably a lie from her mind.

Since they never did, it was definitely a lie inside her dream.

It had to be, because Cole kept fighting with and screaming at Kai, which never happened. It had to be, because she could hear Jay wailing from his workshop. It had to be, because she never even saw Lloyd around anymore.

All fake. Just wake up, silly, wake up.

...but she can't, because that's not how the waking world works.


	2. Chapter 2

**A/N:** Oops. My hand slipped on what was supposed to be a one-shot. Just a little short to get my brain working again!

Fall Back Into Your Dream

Description: _It's been less than a month after the event, and Cole_ needs _._

* * *

Cole wakes up that day with the knowledge that something is wrong. Something is terribly, awfully wrong, and he wants to fix it.

It only takes a second to remember that there is no way he can. He can't fix the way the bed underneath Kai's is so, so empty, he can't fill the hole in his heart and the holes in the ones of the other ninja. Even if he can repair the Bounty, Cole is completely powerless to repair the damage and the tears and the pain they all find themselves in.

It's _wrong_. The room is cold, but not as cold as it should be, because he had cocooned himself with blankets the night before, desperate to get away from the little chills of the cool air in the Bounty, so he wouldn't fall asleep and dream of the person he couldn't see again.

He couldn't deal with that, so he hid from anything, anything that would tell his mind to dream, to think, of _him_. The calendar was torn down, lest he catch a glimpse of the birthday that was supposed to be that month, and ripped into pieces blindly.

Kai had yelled, howled, when he saw the shreds on the floor. He had tackled Cole, crying and furious, and screamed in agony at him to _fix it_.

'Put it back!' the fire ninja had shrieked, voice shaking with something like rage but it too broken to completely be anger, as his hands clumsily moved to try and put the pieces back together like a puzzle. 'Fix it! Fix what you _did_!'

Cole hadn't. He had screamed right back and hidden away from the marked calendar pieces like they burned him, even when Kai flung the tape dispenser he had just emptied at the earth ninja. It had hit his back as he ran. There was a bruise now, to the left of his lower back. Kai had been aiming at him not with the intent to harm, but there was still some sort of brokenness that made him fling it with less than friendly intentions.

"I," the word tumbles off his tongue. He can taste his own disgusting breath, hot on his tongue as he speaks for the first time that day. There's nobody in the room to hear it, but Cole feels like it need to be said. For whatever reason, to fill the silence, to fill the agony, the hole, but it's just… just nothing. Only the word, disappearing in the air, and the pain.

He searches for a sound in the terribly quiet room, and all he finds is his own breathing.


	3. Chapter 3

stuttering thoughts i can't breathe

Description: And he can't think- why can't he think- if he thinks he can fix- he can rebuild-

Jay is tired, his hands shake when he moves wires around, and he doesn't want to sleep- he doesn't want to rest-

He can't stop, not when he's so close-

The programming really should go to Nya but it's working-

It doesn't sound like-

It doesn't look like-

But it is, it has to be-

All around his desk, there are bottles of canned coffee, drunk lukewarm and thrown aside cold, broken pencils and spots of ink where pens exploded, and- and a-

He can't think. He can't think. He needs to think, stop getting distracted-

A broken blue eye stares up at him from his desk-

His head is buzzing, it's hot and he can't stop-

The door makes a krick noise as it goes forward and it slashes through Jay's mind, he swivels around-

"Jay," someone says, a someone who has blonde hair and for a second Jay can trick himself into thinking that-

"I knew that you weren't-" Jay starts to speak, eyes just barely misty, they can't cry anymore they're so dry-

"Jay," that person says again, and the voice breaks his heart all over again because he's back, he's not gone- "please."

Then the person walks up to him, and with a sharp movement he doesn't realize is happening until it's over, takes him up in a hug. Then Jay's mind clears just barely, just barely enough to hug back and cry. He breathes in the scent, the scent he can't trick himself into thinking is the smell of the warm kitchen and sage, he takes in the feeling of warm, warm hands and a warm, warm body that isn't always cold and freezing and-

He hugs Lloyd, Lloyd with an empty look on his face, Lloyd who holds just barely holds him in his loose grip, and closes his eyes.

The other tightens his grip, just barely, on the back of his shirt, and Jay falls into sleep, still crying as though dragged into it by claws, then Lloyd is a man with a tighter grip, a grip that promises to never let him go, and he has the smile, the one that Jay just can't make in his workshop-

He doesn't want to wake up in a world without this.


	4. Chapter 4

Still We Come Back To Our Graves

Description: _She's going to wake up and forget this all happened._

The floors are wet. Nya can feel it, the cold rainwater slipping and sliding between her toes. It's strange, muted, because she's in a dream.

Of course it is. Otherwise the hall wouldn't feel so oddly cold, and the storm outside would be a normal storm with-

It would be a normal storm. She just can't remember what they're like.

It's just because her mind is a little hazy from being inside the dream. That's right, it'll only be a matter of time before she can feel everything right again and know everything right again and have her projects in her hands, not destroyed, not-

It's only a matter of time.

She walks down the hall. It's quiet.

As she walks, she plans, too. When she wakes up, there's going to be an annoying alarm clock, and Nya'll focus on that, instead of her memories. Hopefully, it'll be one of those dreams that she forgets as soon as she wakes up, if not being left with a few watery dregs. Then, she'll stretch, put on one of her nice red dresses, and close her eyes. And in the blackness of her eyelids, there will be a scent. Sometime sweet, or not, but altogether perfect because- _wow, Zane, you've outdone yourself again!-_ and then there will be a pep in her step as she heads to the breakfast table.

There, the only ninja who wakes up before her will greet her with a smile, and lift up a plate or pan or something _just right_ for the morning. She'll yawn, and take the plate with a ' _thanks, this smells delicious'_ , and sit right where she always does.

Nya stops where she is. The rainwater is still sloshing around her feet, going _swish, swish,_ through the closed corridors of the Bounty.

But the tiles of the kitchen are colder than the water.

 _She screams._


	5. Chapter 5

He stands in front of the statue, and falls. Just a moment of his legs going weak, just a tiny contact with the eyes, the posture, the smile of the statue, and he is on a knee in the dirt, breathing heavy as the statue stands still. He waits for it to move.

It's as lifelike as Cole's sketches had been. They'd all seen the sketches, the concepts, all drawn in a shaky hesitant hand, but they hadn't been _this-_ not standing in the center of the park, not sitting still on the stone bench, holding out an arm as an empty perch.

It's beautiful. It really, really is.

He drags his eyes over the statue, slow, and tries to absorb the grey through his eyes. Stone, that's all it is. Stone. Grey. Stone. It won't move.

He is the Green Ninja, but he cannot breathe life into this.

And damn it, if that doesn't hurt like a sledgehammer to the chest. The aching spreads throughout his body, a pressure at the back of his knees that forces him gently to the ground on both.

He settles back on his ankles. Closes his eyes. Breathes.

A fluttering of feathers.

Lloyd's eyes open.

The falcon lands on Zane's arm.

It's all a rush as the falcon settles, softly chirping. It nudges at the statue's closed eyelids and smile.

Zane, laughing at a joke and moving around the deck with the falcon perched on one arm and a broom in his hand. Lloyd, watching from underneath him and holding the dustpan. Tilting his head up. Meeting his eyes, too soon after. Growing up too quick. Zane, putting tea into his hands and the words he needs into the night air. Zane, the falcon as his eyes. Zane, leading him to watch the stars. Zane, pointing out comets. Zane, smiling, soft, patient.

Lloyd's voice shakes, but doesn't fail him.

"It's not him, Falcon. Zane's not coming back." The falcon looks him in the eye, piercing and inquisitive. Asking him 'why?'

He holds his arm out. The falcon hesitates for a moment, cooing softly. It tries for another second to wake its owner, nuzzling at the cold stone cheek.

The talons poke at Lloyd's skin beneath his winter sweater, but he doesn't flinch. He'll never be able to do it like Zane had- he'll need a proper glove- but…

He'll try. His damn hardest, he'll try.


End file.
